Spam Lives
from the forever dept
An article telling us what we all know already (unfortunately). Spam messages are like cockroaches. You can't kill them. The article points out that the industry isn't really doing anything to police itself (despite what they say) and most spammers aren't really a part of any "industry" anyway. It's nice that the FTC is "cracking down" on spam, but really they're just sending mean angry letters to spammers. Basically, he's saying that we're just going to have to suck it up and deal with all this spam. I'm not yet so pessimistic, but I'll admit it's not looking good.
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You can kill cockroaches
Supposidly spam is protected by free speech. Yet there are laws against sending unsolicted spam faxes, so why doesn't the 1st Ammendment apply to them?
Anyway can a programmer exercise their free speech by writing software to filter out and trash spam before it even reaches the recipient's inbox? Then the programmer can exercise their right to free enterprize by selling the spam killing app to ISP's and those running their own servers.
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Only ~100% effective solution so far
Phillip.
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Re: Only ~100% effective solution so far
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White lists
Yes, better to have it held on the server and then you approve the messages. As to filters, also trash sight unseen anything that is routed through foriegn servers, spammers seem to like open relays in developing countries.
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Re: You can kill cockroaches
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Re: You can kill cockroaches
Well, duh! That is why the person was advocating summarily trashing spam coming from off shore. Evenstill, it isn't someone in a developing country sending the spam, it is some jerk in the USA, spam just passes through off shore servers to avoid legal threats.
Ya wanna see something happen about off shore spam. Wait until some nut case brings down important servers such as military or infrastucture service by mail bombing them from off shore. Politicians don't seem to care about John Q. Public until they suffer the same condition.
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